


Jacobean

by TheMissingMask



Series: Basil lives [7]
Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Fire, Henry is a little murderous, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Poison, Revenge, Romance, Warning: House on Fire, all in a good cause, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 15:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21430819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMissingMask/pseuds/TheMissingMask
Summary: Dorian isn't very good at murder.  Unfortunately for him, Lord Henry is.
Relationships: Basil Hallward/Henry Wotton
Series: Basil lives [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1135280
Comments: 3
Kudos: 59





	Jacobean

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As Lord Henry watched the flames curl and writhe from within Dorian’s house, he mused, listlessly, what unassuming reprimand Basil might have offered had the artist been standing by his side tonight. No doubt, Basil would simply have said his name in that shocked, almost disappointed, tone that he reserved for those moments when Henry’s jesting went too far. And Henry would justify himself, without quite apologising, but showing Basil that he was at least aware of the wrongdoing he had committed, even if he felt no remorse for doing so.

But there was no Basil Hallward to reprimand Lord Henry tonight. There was no conscience to sully the numb contentment he felt, watching the fruits of his labours flicker in serpentine heat before him.

The house was burning, and Dorian within it.

The servants, in their nightgowns and carrying what possessions they could, were a chattering mass just beyond the front lawn. The neighbours, significantly better attired, formed another on the street. All stood and watched in morbid fascination. The spectacle of a burning building. A great, magnificent pyre, lighting up the foggy night.

Police stood about in a feign of keeping order, while firefighters attempted to form teams to quell the growing flames. They would fail. They didn't realise, perhaps, but Lord Henry knew the folly of their trial. The fire would burn until the house was little more than a skeleton of its former splendour. The men who had started it were experts in their field. They knew their trade perfectly, and could precisely ensure the absolute decimation of one building with barely a charred brick to its neighbours. They had been paid handsomely for the work, far beyond what they requested. With the promise of such wealth, a well-done job was inevitable.

There was something almost pleasing in being able to watch a doomed activity. It was like listening to all the erroneous and foolish conjectures offered by the others on the street - reasons for the fire, possible consequences, and how it reflected the political state of the country. It was not quite as pleasing, however, as overhearing the servants a little farther away, their alarmed voices insisting that the master of the house was nowhere to be seen. Henry could almost have smiled. Were it not for the loneliness creeping at the edges of his consciousness, he might have done.

Dorian Gray was certainly still inside, waiting to be consumed by flame if he had not yet been so. A gift had arrived for him earlier that day, accompanied by a single line of text. A quote from the book Lord Henry had bestowed upon him in the early days of their acquaintance, and a box of laburnum-poisoned Turkish delight. Dorian Gray, alone, would know who the gift was from and, through his misplaced admiration of Henry, would have eagerly indulged. Lethargy, perhaps even coma, would soon have followed. He would be unable to escape the fire to be started that night.

Lord Henry may not have had the patience to read in full the letter of confession from Dorian’s chemist - indeed, he had noted little more than the words 'disposed', 'corpse' and 'Basil Hallward' - but he was patient enough to prepare to the smallest detail the means by which he might ensure Dorian received his due punishment. The chemist, without an apology or sign of remorse, at least not in the first couple of lines, had written to confess to the deed Dorian had made him undertake. The message clearly received, Henry had discarded the letter on a table, open and not since touched. Revered like a shrine for the two weeks since it had arrived. Everyday of the fortnight spent arranging the necessary actions to ensure Basil's death was answered for.

As he stood now before the fire, Lord Henry was just another in the crowd of entranced onlookers. The vulgar gentry who lived nearby, fascinated to watch the scene of destruction as if it were some theatre piece and did not mark the extinction of another man’s life. Deaf to all their chattering about him, mute to offer any response, Lord Henry watched as the crowd grew larger and the flames grew smaller, until at last the thing was done. The house destroyed, the fire dwindled to almost nothing, and Dorian Gray but ashes somewhere within the charred and smoking carcass.

Lord Henry lit a cigarette, turned on his heel, and left.

He returned home, to his library where the letter remained open on the table. It, in a strange way, had become the headstone Basil could never have. Something of him, even if only a name, lay in the text within. The artist himself, gone, no body to bury and erect a stone above. His possessions mostly in France. Henry could retrieve them, of course, and had men sent forth to do so, but even still, there was something too distant about those things and to vicinal about the letter.

The author of the correspondence, the architect who deprived Lord Henry of a grave for his closest friend, remained unknown. His name was no doubt on there somewhere, but Henry cared little for whoever the man was. Just another victim of Dorian Gray, the one truly to blame.

Of course, he had paid, now. But it was too late for Basil. Too late for all the others Dorian had hurt. Henry's own family even, although he didn't feel the sorrow for them as keenly as that for Basil.

For three days, Lord Henry did little other than sit and smoke in that library, thinking as he looked upon the portrait of himself over the fire. He tried to find the traces of its creator in it. Basil claimed that the artist was in the portrait. But where was he now? Reduced to fragments, molecules, atoms? Nothing left of him but a scattering of paintings around London and Paris, a name in a letter, and a memory of years gone by seared into Henry’s mind.

He lit another cigarette as the former finished, watching the wreaths of smoke wind their way throughout the room.

One of his servants, whose name Henry didn’t care in that moment to recall, walked in and announced a visitor. The name, somehow in Henry’s apparently grieving mind, came out of the servant’s mouth in the shape of Basil Hallward. The lord bid, without himself hearing the words he said, the visitor be admitted.

Moments later the door opened and closed, and before him stood the apparition of Basil Hallward. Pale and gaunt and looking exhausted, his hair unkempt and his clothes ill-fitting. Not his own clothes, clearly. Henry absently contemplated whether the issue of unfitted suits was a habit of heaven, or a strange punishment of hell.

“Harry.” The name on Basil’s lips was quiet and hesitant, fragile, like the vision of the artist who stood alone before the closed doorway.

“You’re dead.” Henry remarked, observing the spectre through the smoke that trailed from his cigarette.

“Not quite,” came the reply.

Lord Henry watched, unconcerned and unmoved, as Basil Hallward’s ghost stepped closer to him, lingering at the end of the couch upon which the lord reclined.

The lord reached out, for the apparition was now well within reach, and wrapped his fingers around one wrist.

“I did not expect ghosts to be so solid,” he said, lifting the cigarette to his lips.

“I’m not a ghost, Harry,” Basil’s ghost claimed in a voice that sounded so very like Basil’s non-ghost self.

Patient exasperation. How very like Basil this spectre was.

“That correspondance,” Henry continued, waving a hand absently towards the letter, “Says you’re dead.”

“Did you read the letter through?”

“There’s nothing of worth beyond the first two lines of a letter.”

It was a discussion they had had before. Rather, it was a fact Henry had proclaimed to be so, against which Basil had argued and been largely ignored.

“Unfortunately, that truth is not universally acknowledged,” Basil replied, pulling his wrist free and moving to the table to take up the letter.

“What else was there to say? You are dead, Dorian is responsible.”

“I am not dead,” Basil rejoined distantly, reading as he spoke, “As for Dorian…”

“What does the letter add further?”

“That Dorian did not kill me, although he did try. He stabbed me in the neck and had thought me dead. A chemist, who writes the letter, was blackmailed by Dorian to dispose of my body, but he found me still alive, and orchestrated to get me to the house of a nearby physician without Dorian’s knowledge,” Basil replied, handing the letter to Henry and sitting beside him on the couch, “He has been very kind to me these past days since I woke up, and leant me the clothes so that I might come and see you.”

Henry’s eyebrows rose a fraction and, in a languid motion, he sat up. Reaching out, he pressed his fingertips to the bandage just visible beneath the collar of Basil’s cheap shirt.

“I thought murder was entirely too romantic for you,” he said at last, reclining once more.

“Yes, I suppose it was.” Conceded the artist thoughtfully, and he took back the letter, folding it neatly and placing it beside him on the couch.

They lapsed into a momentary silence, which Henry filled with the soft exhale of thick blue smoke, watching Basil intently.

“You were always going to outlast Dorian,” he said at last, voice seeming bored but with an edge Basil didn't wish to name.

“Was I?”

“Of course. I couldn’t allow it otherwise.” Henry shrugged, reached out and pulled Basil down into his embrace, “I need someone who understands me.”

“Yes, you do,” Basil let his eyes fall shut, head rested on Henry’s shoulder, “Where is Dorian now?”

“Where I was led to believe you were.”

Basil started and might have sat up straight, had Henry’s arm not held him down, close against him.

“He’s dead?”

“Exceedingly.”

“How?”

“His house burned down with him inside.”

Basil paused, nervously letting his fingers trace the patterns on Henry’s waistcoat, “All of it?”

“Essentially.”

“Even the attic?”

“It was part of the house.”

Basil leant up just enough to look Henry in the eye, “Harry, be serious. Did the attic burn?”

Lord Henry frowned, shifting so that he could see the painter better, “Why?”

Basil sighed, chewing his lip a moment, “It’s incredible. Obscene and terrible.”

“You can tell me later,” Henry said, “I am in no mood for obscene and terrible. The attic burned. Does that satisfy you sufficiently to hold that story for another time?”

“Yes,” the artist replied, “It will keep for another time.”

Henry dropped the end of the cigarette in the copper tray beside him, and wrapped both arms around Basil, drinking deep the warmth of the other man, “I thought you were dead.”

“Did you weep?”

“Of course not. I can only ever weep in front of you, and you weren’t there.”

“I’m here now.”

“And so deprive me of a reason to weep.”

“Good,” Basil closed his eyes, the lingering exhaustion from his injury weighing upon him, “Sorrow is a poor match for your features.”

  
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End file.
